Emotion dysregulation in the experience of pain among persons living with HIV/AIDS

ABSTRACT

Persons living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) report disproportionally high rates of pain. Pain among PLWHA has been associated with poor medication adherence and anxiety and depressive symptoms. This relationship may be primarily driven by elevated negative affect, and one factor that may be important to understanding elevated negative affect is emotion dysregulation. Therefore, the current study sought to examine emotion dysregulation (Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale) in terms of multi-dimensional pain experience (pain severity, pain interference, pain affective distress, pain life control; Multidimensional Pain Inventory; Turk and Rudy (1988) among a sample of 162 HIV+ individuals (M_age = 47.65, SD = 8.59, 35.2% female). Two-step hierarchical regression analyses revealed that emotion dysregulation total score was significantly associated with each of the pain variables. These results may suggest PLWHA who demonstrate greater emotion dysregulation struggle to effectively manage negative affect associated with their pain experience, exacerbating the severity of pain symptoms across numerous clinically-relevant domains. The novel findings may provide important assessment and intervention targets for PLWHA living with pain.

KEYWORDS:

• Pain
• HIV/AIDS
• emotion dysregulation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Anxiety disorder diagnosis was included as a covariate in post-hoc analyses and the pattern and strength of the results remained the same. Therefore, the presented results do not include anxiety disorder diagnosis as a covariate because the results were unchanged, and it was not part of the a priori model being tested.